Recently, Ugandan BBC host Alan Kasujja posted on X: “There’s a systemic coordinated messaging against Rwanda from Western capitals,” adding a rhetorical question: “Why aren’t we talking about their interest in critical minerals?” He isn’t alone in noticing the trend of actions by Western powers and in reflecting on what is driving them. The fact that Europeans had agreed on a hostile narrative on Rwanda’s positioning regarding the conflict in eastern DRC was obvious to many commentators on the social media platform. My own view triggered by Mr Kasujja’s reflections was: “There has been no systematic coordinated response from African countries. This is why they do it.” African leaders always seem to want to copy Europeans when they shouldn’t, and never when they should.
Europeans introduced the idea that states exist to pursue their interests, to justify their interstate wars and to sanitise what they were doing as something different from the kind of wars waged by ‘backward tribal societies’. Whenever their interests could not be achieved via diplomacy, war became “diplomacy by other means”. This is the concept of “realism”.
Also, Europeans learnt that inter-state wars were ruinous for all involved. So they decided to integrate their societies, economies and politics. In so doing, they integrated their interests. Since they were integrated and had common interests, individual state realism no longer made sense. They turned to the concept of “idealism”. Here they were willing to sacrifice narrow national interests for collective interests. This explains why the countries of the European Union subsidise (with jobs, trade, and free movement of goods, services and people) the poorer countries that are new to the Union.
When Europe is not being blindingly subservient to the US, its gaze is laser-focused on the strategic, not the tactical, on the forest, not the trees, that is, on the big picture. The big picture is Europe’s long-term stability and shared prosperity. The rich countries understand that their prosperity is built on quicksand if there are poor and unstable countries next door. The idea is that either they are all secure or none of them will be. When they talk about European solutions to European problems, they are not just sloganeering; they put their money where their mouth is. The national interest is meaningful only as a complement to the collective interest, and when they conflict, it is clear what must be sacrificed. They will even veto election results in a country and demand new elections if they perceive a threat to the collective.
In this way, Europeans are intentionally bipolar. They engage countries with which they share a common destiny on the basis of idealism (to be protected, preserved and nurtured) and the rest of us on the basis of realism (to be manipulated, divided and exploited). In other words, they see the big picture, even if an African leader who is the subject of this manipulation accepts it in the mistaken belief that they are reliable and dependable friends.
The curse of narrow interests
Africans have conceived progress as something that is derived from mimicking Europeans (and Americans). They are copycats of the text (Democracy, Human Rights), but rarely the subtext (values: who are we and what do we hold dear, as a people, and at what cost are we prepared to pay in defending who we are), and the context (the problem at the time that gave rise to the particular solution).
The African Union, for example, is a direct descendant of the European Union, but this has not brought with it the understanding that relations among members of the Union cannot be driven merely by pursuit of national interests, but the common destiny that underpins the Union. So far there lacks a sense of sacrifice, of forgoing narrow interests in favour of the long-term goals of shared stability and prosperity.
East African leaders (at one point even Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi) repeatedly urged President Tshisekedi to seek a political solution to the conflict in the DRC and sent troops to oversee preparations for such a process. However, when Tshisekedi rebuffed them, they failed to use their collective leverage to influence his conduct. It seemed as if each of them was concerned with their respective national (often individual) interests, for which they were unwilling to make an iota of sacrifice.
Just as the darkness of night is followed by the light of day, so whenever there is a vacuum of moral courage, its amoral consequences are certain.
Every time there is a vacuum of moral courage, it is filled by the amoral, the greedy and the manipulative. The only thing needed by those who were willing to submit to Tshisekedi’s manipulation was the cloak of “national interest”. The line between individual and national interests became blurred, with the former often camouflaged by the latter to give legitimacy to military adventure.
There is no other way to understand the deployment of South African troops, effectively aimed at derailing EAC peace efforts, to ally with the FDLR, which killed a million people in Rwanda in 1994. Lest we forget who they are, the FDLR are a genocidal outfit that is well known to ANC leaders, as President Mandela never tired of telling the world who these killers were, and about their ambition to return to Rwanda to “complete the job” they had started. And what “job” is it? The extermination of their Tutsi compatriots.
Even Angola, a country with the financial and military means to do so, was unable to exert leverage on Tshisekedi to get him to implement the decisions of its own mediation. In August 2022, Angola was the first country to reject Tshisekedi’s claim that M23 was a terrorist organisation, pointing him to the legitimate political grievances at the root of their rebellion. Nevertheless, Angola saw value in preserving its national interest in the Lobito Corridor project at the expense of pursuing regional interests: long-term stability and prosperity. Its unwillingness to make this sacrifice for the sake of collective goals (after all, it had been appointed by the AU as mediator) means that it has approached the task in realist terms. It also means that it has missed an opportunity to be seen as a principled actor willing to make certain sacrifices for the sake of collective interest, an attitude that would command respect.
Angola did exactly what Europe would do in this situation when dealing with Africa, which is exactly how Europe is currently handling the DRC conflict: pursue its interests. They would not do this when dealing with another European or EU country.
The pursuit of narrow national interests in the context of an unstable region is not likely to produce sustainable peace. If we copy good things from Europeans, what we do will, like what they do, be systematic, coordinated and not self-sabotaging.
